‘Where did the slaver get it?’ I asked, my voice husky with shock. The material felt more like ivory than horn.
‘He wouldn’t tell me directly, only that it was in trade. I suspect that he was lying. Slavers will raid remote villages to grab their victims, and they take the chance to pillage the settlements. I think this is plunder.’
I ran my fingers along the length of the horn, feeling the twist of the spiral glide beneath my touch. ‘Why would it be of value to a doctor?’
‘Items of great rarity are often considered to have medical value. For example, pearls are ground to powder and taken with a herbal infusion as a treatment for convulsions.’
‘Did the Khazar know that it is a unicorn’s horn?’
‘He wasn’t sure what it was. Only that it was something very unusual.’
I passed the horn back to my friend. ‘What did you tell him it was worth?’
‘I tried to avoid giving a value, but then he said he was thinking of offering it to one of Kaupang’s dealers in precious stones and jewellery.’
‘So you bought it.’
My friend treated me to one of his thin-lipped smiles. ‘It was expensive – twelve hundred silver denarii.’
‘The cost is not important,’ I assured him. ‘It would have been a disaster if we had lost the horn. Besides, by the time Redwald has finished haggling with Ohthere and Gorm over the price of the bears and the falcons, he’ll have saved us at least that much.’
‘The Khazar insisted on being paid at once,’ Osric explained. ‘I had to use our coins from the Aachen mint. That’s how the slaver worked out that we must be agents for Carolus himself. He as much as told me so.’
He began to roll the horn back inside the velvet cover. ‘The Khazars know we’ve purchased white bears, and are buying up any white gyrfalcons that are for sale. They’ll be wondering what Carolus wants these animals for. If they also know that white is the imperial colour in Baghdad, they’ll be stupid not to have made the connection between Carolus and the caliph.’
I was so elated at having proof of the unicorn’s existence that only now I thought to ask Osric what he had meant when he said the unused portion of our silver hoard was in safe keeping.
‘I handed the last few coin bags over to Redwald,’ he answered calmly. ‘He’s put them in that secret cubby hole aboard his ship.’
I stared at him. ‘Was that wise?’
Osric was unperturbed. ‘Ohthere was pressing to be paid for the ice bears, and by the time he had a down payment and the Khazar got his coin, less than a third remains.’
A faint shadow of doubt clouded my satisfaction. I wondered if we were putting too much trust in the shipmaster. Even a third of Carolus’s original funds was a temptation for someone sufficiently unscrupulous.
*
Freed of the necessity to mount guard over our silver hoard, Osric and I redoubled our efforts to obtain clues as to where the unicorn itself might be found. We could not interrogate the Khazars because they packed up and left Kaupang abruptly, less than a day after selling the unicorn horn to Osric. So instead we split up and worked the market, asking traders and their customers, sailors down by the landing place; anyone who looked as though they might provide us with information. We were met with blank looks, humorous and sometimes ribald inventions and – as often as not – outright laughter. If we had picked up the slightest hint about where the unicorn lived we would have travelled there immediately, but with each passing day there were fewer people to answer our questions. Midsummer’s day was the highpoint of Kaupang’s annual market and soon afterwards a number of traders began shutting up shop and heading home. The fine weather also left us. Mornings that dawned full of bright sunny promise turned into afternoons when masses of close-packed clouds sailed overhead and a chill west wind rattled the canvas covers on the remaining stalls. The gusts brought sudden, heavy showers. When it rained, Walo usually stayed with his ice bears, and Osric and I would take shelter in the building where Redwald had rented rooms.
It was on such an afternoon that I decided not to wait to be drenched by a downpour from a bank of smoke-coloured clouds moving in rapidly from the sea. Already there were rumbles of distant thunder, and a curtain of heavy rain trailed below the storm’s underbelly. Hurrying my steps, I reached the building ahead of Osric. The drinking den was crowded and several of the clients smelled of wet manure, so I made my way to the smaller room where Osric and Walo had checked their horehound leaves. I stood by the small window, looking out and waiting for my friend. The light dimmed as the storm swept in, and the rain began to come down in a solid cascade, splashing up from great puddles in the rough ground behind the building. I jumped as a flash of lightning lit the sky at no great distance, rapidly followed by an enormous crash of thunder. I came to the conclusion that Osric had got out of the downpour elsewhere so was surprised to hear the door of the little room open behind me. I turned to greet him, but the two men who entered were strangers.
‘Shouldn’t last long,’ I commented cheerfully. I tried to recall where I had seen them before. They were both thickset, rather jowly men dressed in plain, unremarkable clothes. The shoulders of their jackets were only speckled with raindrops so they must have ducked in to shelter just before the cloudburst. The taller one had a heavy, rather stupid-looking face that emphasized his hulking menace. His colleague was even less attractive, with a bull neck and deep-set black eyes that looked as if they had been poked in his pudding-like head with the point of a charred stick.
Neither man responded directly to my greeting. They edged further into the little room, then the taller one closed the door behind him, leaned against it, and folded his arms.
‘Odd-eyes aren’t welcome in this town,’ said Pudding Head nastily. Another crash of thunder drowned the rest of his words.
‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked. It was a feeble response as I tried to work out why the men wanted to pick a quarrel.
Pudding Head moved closer. ‘A seidrmann brings bad luck.’
‘I may have odd eyes, as you call them, but I’m no seidrmann.’
He laughed coarsely. ‘Then why do you keep company with a cripple who looks as if he came from Niflheim and a moonstruck idiot servant?’
Niflheim was the home of the dead. Osric’s dark skin must have seemed outlandish to these yokels.
‘I’m not a magician,’ I repeated, a tight knot of fear gathering in my stomach. Belatedly I recognized the two men. They were the same pair of guards that I had seen from time to time outside the jewellery shop. The jeweller himself had closed up and departed from Kaupang a week earlier so I wondered who now employed them or whether the two men were acting on their own. I could only suppose that they were planning to rob me. I looked for a means of escape. The window behind me was too small, and the ruffian at the door was too burly.
The heart of the thunderstorm was now right over Kaupang. Outside, the torrential rain fell in a steady roar. Peal after peal of thunder shook the building. The air suddenly felt chilly, though that was not what made me shiver. Pudding Face pulled out a knife. The two men were not here to frighten me or even to beat me up. They intended to kill me.
I had long since returned to Redwald the sailor’s knife he had loaned me, and now my only weapon was the knife I used for cutting up food, a blade just four inches long. I pulled it from my belt as I backed away towards the window and saw the look of disdain in the hard, black eyes of my attacker.
I had fought in pitched battles, on foot and on horseback, and with sword and shield. But being trapped in a small room by a pair of cut-throat killers was outside my experience.
Pudding Head was circling to my left, my exposed side, his knife held low in front of him. He jabbed it towards me menacingly. I jumped back out of range, then realized that he was intent on driving me round the little room in a circle, until my back was to his colleague Stupid Face. There I would be clasped in those thick arms and held while his companion put the blade into a fatal spot.